Hockney touches up his classic ‘Tristan’

Sailing into the darkened auditorium of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in early January -- as somber skies threatened to open up and wash away Los Angeles for good -- David Hockney was a springtime breeze in a light-colored suit, jaunty white linen cap and bright red tie.

Having just flown in from London, the 70-year-old British artist claimed jet lag, but it didn’t show as he cheerfully greeted old friends during his first day of rehearsal for Los Angeles Opera’s revival of perhaps its most iconic production, the Hockney-designed “Tristan and Isolde”: “Didn’t we do this in 1987?”

They did indeed. Hockney’s “Tristan,” with wildly fanciful sets and costumes by the contemporary artist, first took shape on the Chandler Pavilion stage just over 20 years ago.

That production was directed by Jonathan Miller, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta, was in the pit -- never, according to Hockney, this world-class orchestra’s favorite place to be.

Hockney also admits to a few clashes with director Miller, who, as the artist tells it, turned down his suggestion that they take a drive from L.A. to just north of Santa Barbara so they could listen to the opera together. “I said: ‘That’ll be 4 1/2 hours when we can listen without interruption,’ and he said no,” Hockney said. “That was very telling. He’s the only director I’ve worked with where we never listened to the music together.” (Miller could not be reached for comment.)

Los Angeles Opera revived the production in 1997, this time with Hockney sharing credit for directing with Stephen Pickover. In the pit, perhaps more contentedly, was Los Angeles Opera’s own orchestra.

Hockney is the first to gently remind a visitor that this is really Wagner’s “Tristan,” not his. Still, since the artist is so associated with Los Angeles, where he has made his home for more than 40 years, the production belongs to Hockney, at least for L.A. audiences.

“When Jonathan Miller said: ‘It’s your show,’ he shocked me -- I told him, ‘I always thought it was the singer, and the composer, a lot more than you or I,’ ” Hockney says -- though adding, with a half-smile: “Well, I did spend some time on it.”

False modesty? Perhaps. Hockney seems to be only half joking when, at a later rehearsal, he observes that his 1987 design for the billowing ship’s sails in Act 1 bears an uncanny resemblance to the curves of architect Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, opened in 2003. “Frank might have seen this, don’t you think?”

With L.A. Opera’s second “revival” of the opera set to open Saturday, the question is raised: What does the word “revival” mean in the case of this homegrown “Tristan” -- and in the opera world as a whole?

“It’s like the Eskimos and snow,” says this revival’s director, Thor Steingraber, 41. “There ought to be more words for what we do when we re-create an opera production, because ‘revival’ covers so many things.”

A complex production

On Broadway, “revival” generally means giving an old script or an old score a face-lift -- new sets, new costumes, new staging. In opera, the term generally refers to keeping the designer’s sets, costumes and sometimes props -- in other words, the look of the production -- but often using a new director, cast and crew, who are free to rework the staging to fit the idiosyncrasies of the new talent.

Steingraber says that, when involved in a new production, today’s opera directors and designers are calling for increasingly sophisticated contracts that allow them to control creative elements, including details of staging, in subsequent revivals.

And that, he explains, is to avoid the horrors of producing a “Three Days in Vienna.”

That’s not the title of a real opera, though it sounds like one; the name has been changed to protect the guilty. Steingraber uses it because he doesn’t want to out the real opera, thrown together in that many days, that he attended in that European city. “The singers, the chorus and the orchestra had never been together before,” Steingraber says. “I find those kinds of revivals functional at best -- amazingly, singers not standing in the light, choristers in the wrong places; there were even places in this particular production in Vienna where the orchestra fell apart because there was a new conductor.

“Some companies do those revivals well; some companies do them in a slapdash manner,” Steingraber continues. “You’ll talk to performers, who are, say, arriving in Vienna to their first ‘Rosenkavalier,’ and -- this is a true story -- they have three days to do their first rehearsal, then a dress rehearsal, and then they open. It’s an economic necessity, but nobody likes it.”

Was the “Three Days in Vienna” of which Steingraber speaks actually a horror-show production of Richard Strauss’ 1911 comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier”? We’re not asking, and he’s not telling. But the director adds that many highly respected opera companies, including New York City’s behemoth Metropolitan Opera, perform so many operas in repertoire that they go up with a similarly limited rehearsal period -- though presumably with less appalling results.

“Some companies have 20 or 30 shows, which means that, literally, the next season the production is duplicated to the T,” Steingraber says. “There is very little rehearsal time, very little lighting time; maybe the chorus isn’t even rehearsed again. They just plug in a few new singers, add water, and go. That’s maybe where the word ‘revival’ is most literal.”

Such is rarely the case with any production of “Tristan,” Steingraber says. Because Wagner’s four-hour-plus work is one of the most difficult ever written for the two singers in the title roles, it’s not the kind of opera most companies choose to bring back every year or even couple of years. In this incarnation, John Treleaven sings Tristan and Linda Watson is Isolde (with Susan Foster singing the role at the Feb. 3 performance).

And, he adds, Hockney’s involvement in all three of the L.A. Opera mountings has made them something else entirely. Steingraber calls the 2008 “Tristan” “a new production on a pre-existing set.”

More than a few tweaks

Because of his hearing problems, Hockney has retired from designing new opera productions, but for this revival he hunkers down with his longtime assistant, Richard Schmidt, over a laptop computer, comparing what he sees on the rehearsal stage with production photos from 1987.

The Hockney production has been revived elsewhere, most recently in San Francisco in 2006. During the development of that production, Hockney was represented by Schmidt, who has been involved since the 1987 “Tristan.”

Although virtually every opera set receives touch-ups along the way, after San Francisco, the Hockney sets got a major refurbishing. Christopher Koelsch, L.A. Opera’s vice president of artistic planning, says that $20,000 to $40,000 was spent on “brightening” such elements as a fairy-tale forest and a pink castle that, in one set, dominates one side of the stage.

Lighting designer Duane Schuler, who also oversaw the 1997 revival and the San Francisco production, notes one huge change from the 1987 original: At that time, L.A. Opera’s “Tristan” was the first opera production to employ Vari-Lite, one of the first automated variable-color lighting systems. The system, at that time used mainly for rock concerts, allowed for a play of light and shadow unprecedented on the opera stage.

The technology was also very loud -- not a problem on the rock concert stage, more problematic at the opera. Hockney points out that when the Tristan character sang, “Do I hear the light?” in the 1987 production, the reference was all too literal. In 1997, though, new technology allowed the lighting effects to occur silently.

Director Steingraber notes another change from both 1987 and 1997: This time, he and Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon decided not to remove an often-cut 12 minutes of music from Act 2’s 42-minute duet by Tristan and Isolde.

“It is famously difficult to sing and famously difficult to translate,” Steingraber says. “It’s Wagner’s most philosophical ponderings in the whole piece. So I am left with a new bit of production, in a section that is incredibly tricky. There’s a domino effect; the whole 42 minutes has to be reconsidered. It will be something new for the L.A. audience.”

For his part, these days Hockney is occupied with painting, not opera -- as well as acting as a self-appointed spokesman for smokers’ rights, railing against British pubs and French cafes for beginning to adopt the same bans on smoking in public places that have become standard in the U.S. “What are they for, cafes? They’re not health clubs!” he complains during -- surprise -- a smoking break outside the Chandler Pavilion.

Still, he appreciates the chance to be part of this revival and says that his own philosophy of opera designing hasn’t changed in 20 years. “I did nine operas in a period of 20 years, and my rule was, Rule No. 1 -- well, I’ll put it this way: Don’t . . . up the music, because that’s why you go to the opera. Everything has always come from the music.”

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diane.haithman@latimes.com

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‘Tristan and Isolde’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 7 p.m. Saturday and Jan. 23; 1 p.m. Jan. 27; 7 p.m. Jan. 31; 1 p.m. Feb. 3; 7 p.m. Feb. 6; 1 p.m. Feb. 10

Price: $20 to $238

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.laopera.com